The present invention relates to electronic postage meters, and more particularly to electronic postage meters operating under control of a program and including nonvolatile memories (NVMs), such as the type disclosed in the aforementioned related patent applications.
Known electronic postage meters employing firmware such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,301,507, issued on Nov. 17, 1981, and assigned to Pitney Bowes, Inc. of Stamford, Conn. are programmed via ROMs to undergo a certain sequence of operations. Such arrangement is adequate for use with a particular postal system such as that presently employed in the United States. However, for an electronic postage meter to be capable of international usage; where the requirements of the postal systems of the various countries vary widely, the number of individual programs or software packages required to accommodate such variations would increase the programming costs significantly.
Thus, it is clear that in a postage meter such as that disclosed in the above-mentioned patent, upon assembly will have certain information within it, that identifies it with a particular postage meter. Dependent upon the country that the meter is to be utilized in, there may also be certain firmware variables or parameters such as the number of decimal places, the contents of the ascending register or descending register, the batch count or the piece count information that must be satisfied to to in accordance with postal regulations of that particular country. Accordingly, a particular meter is generally produced for each of the countries, that has a particular software or firmware instruction set within it that provides parameters for that particular postage meter. However, producing postage meters in this way would require a large inventory of postage meters in each country that the meter is to be used. The cost of the meters utilized in each country would be correspondingly more expensive due to large inventory requirements.
Thus, what is needed is a method and apparatus for allowing for the change of certain firmware variables or parameters within the postage meters to allow for a modularity of the meter and would also allow the meter to be adapted to different types of postal regulations. The meter must also have the capability of being adaptable with existing mailing equipment and also provide the same enhanced security measures that it utilized in existing postage meters.